HISPANICS: Speech - San Antonio, TX - 7/1/92 REMARKS BY GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS JULY 1, 1992 Thank you very much, Governor Richards. I appreciate the introduction; I do not appreciate having to speak behind Ann Richards. I'm glad to be here with her and the wonderful granddaughter she made famous at the Democratic Convention four years ago, with my long-time friend, Henry Cisneros, your president, Jose Valez, and Ben Rodriguez, who's the president of the LULAC chapter in Arkansas who has been a long-time friend of mine; served on my inaugural committees and fed me many dinners, let me help him get some land for an Hispanic cultural center in our state. To all of you here at this convention, I want to say a special word of thanks to the Texans here who helped me win in the Democratic primary and to others throughout the country who were involved in some way or another in this nominating fight. This is an interesting election year, and I know this is a non- partisan organization, but I have been working on my campaign memoirs, I haven't gotten very far, I haven't written a word, but I picked a title, "A Billionaire, A Millionaire and Me." And there's going to be a chapter about how Dan Quayle decided that I was in the cultural elite. Do you believe that? Dan Quayle's going to the Rotary Club in Little Rock, Arkansas tomorrow telling all the people of Arkansas about the family values that we ought to have. And he says I'm in the cultural elite even though I may be the last person ever to seek the presidency who lived in a house without indoor plumbing. Now, if you've ever been to the bathroom outside in the winter, you know you cannot be in the culturally elite and do that. And I have concluded that the only way I made that grade is that I still am able to spell potato. I have a simple message for you today. And that is that the old adage mi casa, su casa will be true when my house is the White House. I come here to pledge to you an administration that looks like America, that feels like America, that understands the pain and promise of this country and will involve you and all Americans in the struggle to make it better. An America that has a government which enforces the Voting Rights Act, believes in equal opportunity for all people and acts like it, makes it easier for people to register to vote with bills like the Motor Voter Registration instead of vetoing such bills, as the President has threatened to do. And administration which will help immigrants into this country to become citizens instead of making it more difficult for them to become citizens and exercise the full range of rights according to people -- accorded to people who are citizens. But most importantly, an administration that will make opportunity a reality and not a dream. For nearly a dozen years now our government in Washington has not worked very well for us. It spends more money and gets less results, except for the very wealthy and the special interests. In 1980 we were asked to begin this experiment in an unusual form of government for the United States. We were asked to give this country greater inequality; make the rich richer, make the middle class and the poor worse off, shift the burden away from the wealthy to the middle class and the working poor and off onto the deficit. We were promised that if we just had a little more inequality we'd get jobs and growth and we'd be more competitive in the world economy. Well, we got the inequality. The top one percent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom ninety percent for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. Seventy percent of the gains of the last dozen years have gone to people in the top one percent. But guess what? We didn't get the other end of the deal. We didn't get growth. We've had the three slowest years of growth since before World War II. We didn't get jobs. We've got unemployment galore. And worse, huge increases in the number of working poor. There's been a nine percent decline in the income of working Hispanics in America. And the percentage of Hispanic Americans who are working for a living but living below the poverty line has doubled from eleven to twenty-two percent. It was a bad deal and we got a bum rap. And this election is our chance to change it. When half of your children drop out of high school before they finish, we all pay. We pay when their lives are less than they ought to be. When they can't work and fulfill the promise of America and live their lives as they might, we all pay, for all of society is weakened by the weakest links. We have paid a terrible price for this foolish experiment in which we have been engaged for more than a dozen years. It is time that we put the people of America first again and gave the American people a government that worked for them again. Governor Richards has said I have offered a plan. In the last three weeks I have gone all across America, talk shows in the morning, talk shows at night, town meetings. President Bush calls them those weird little talk shows. I like those weird little talk shows; real people get to ask questions. You don't have to filter it through all the media. My plan is simple and straightforward and bold. It would put fifty billion dollars a year in new investment into this economy. Incentives for people to create jobs in the private sector in this country, but no more incentives to move our jobs overseas. It would create jobs for the twenty-first century, twenty billion dollars in new transportation and communication networks in rebuilding the American economy and putting defense workers back to work and making America strong at home. If we create vast opportunities in education, something I know you're here to talk about today. I don't have to read political polls or wait for elections to care about education. It has been the driving force of my public life. And without an education I wouldn't be standing here today to try and run a race for president of the United States to give you your country back. It's pretty clear to me what we have to do; not at all clear that we will do it. That's what we're going to have this election about. We need to give all the kids in this country a chance to get off to a good start in school. That means real maternal and child health programs, it means finally funding the Head Start Program instead of talking about it, the way this administration's been doing for four years. It means strengthening the education programs in our public schools, smaller classes in the early grades, more help for districts that are underfunded, meaningful bi-lingual education programs not just for Hispanic children but for children all over America whose first language is not English who need to learn English but need to learn in their own language while they're learning it. It means real opportunities for people and incentives to stay in school so that the kids that are having trouble will have access to alternative schools. And every child should be able to be told when they're in their adolescence, "Look, if you'll stay in school and play by the rules, you will be rewarded. If you don't want to go to college but you don't want to be in dead end jobs, we'll give you an apprenticeship program for two years of further education and training on the job to restore the dignity of blue-collar work in this country." There's no reason America should be the only nation without one. And if you do want to go to college, you will be able to go. We'll let you borrow the money from a new national trust fund that will take the best of two great American ideas, the GI Bill after World War II and the Peace Corps started under President Kennedy. Everybody can borrow the money and pay it back according to their ability to pay, either with a small percentage of their income after they go to work or even better by giving two years of their life here at home to an American Peace Corp. Come back to San Antonio and pay off your college loan by being a teacher or a police officer or working to keep kids off drugs and out of gangs, or working in a health clinic. Help to solve the problems of America. And we must at long last join the ranks of all the other advanced countries and provide a system of affordable health care for all Americans. I don't know a single serious person who works in the health care system who won't say, we're spending enough money already, thirty percent more than any other nation in the world, but we're not doing the right things with it. We're spending our money on health insurance and bureaucracy and regulation, and on taking care of people too late because we have stubbornly refused to put clinics in the cities and the rural areas and to give primary and preventive care to people when they need it instead of letting them get too sick and too expensive to care for. If you vote for me, in the first hundred days of the next administration I'll give the United States a plan that will cut the waste in this health care system and take that money and put it in a basic package of affordable health care for all Americans, and our country will be better for it. There is so much that we can do together. In this plan one of the things we're going to do is to give a hundred thousand police officers back to our cities so that they can work with their friends and neighbors in community police settings to reduce the crime rate, to help keep kids out of trouble. We'll fund experiments like community-based boot camps to avoid sending youngsters to prison when they're first-time offenders if they can stay home and have drug treatment and discipline and education and do community service work. We'll begin to make America work again. And I'll tell you something else, we'll show the Republicans something about family values. The very idea of this administration lecturing to the Hispanic community about family values, a community which values family as much as any group of Americans, against all the odds and under all the stresses, if this administration believed in family values, why do they keep us so out of step with the rest of the world in valuing families? It's harder to raise a kid in dignity and success and work for a living in this country than in any other advanced country in the world because this administration does not value families. Where is the child care? Where are the pre-school programs? Where is the tax system which values people who work hard and are still in poverty raising their children? Nobody in this country who works forty hours a week with kids in the house should be consigned to live in poverty. And if you vote for me I'll give you a tax system that will lift those people above the poverty line. Let us reward work and family. Why did this president veto the Family and Medical Leave Act, which all other advanced countries recognize, if we value family? A mother ought not to lose her job if she has to go home to give birth to a baby or to take care of a sick parent. Where are the family values there? Where are the family values when we have no initiatives to lift up the kids who are in trouble, to bring them back into the mainstream, to make it possible for them to be part of the American dream? Oh, I believe in family values. If it weren't for family values, most of us wouldn't be here today. The difference between me and this administration is, if you vote for me, I'll act like I believe in family values instead of talking about them all the time. I ask you to resolve that in this election you will exercise your citizenship to take your country back, to make your government work, to have it put people first again, to make the American dream a reality again. What is killing this country today is not the dimensions of our problems, though they are great. We have been through tougher times. If you think America's in trouble today, imagine what it was like on the eve of the outbreak of the Civil War. If you think America is in trouble today, imagine what it was like in the Great Depression. If you think we've got big problems today, remember when millions of Americans couldn't even vote and weren't allowed to stay in the same public accommodations and were regularly brutalized and murdered with no local law enforcement even taking any notice. What is killing us today is not that we have problems. Each generation of Americans is confronted with problems. We are being killed today because seventy percent of our people don't believe that this system will work anymore. They don't think there's any connection between what we say when we're running and what we do when we get in. They don't believe that they're important to anybody, that America can be part of a community again where we're all pulling for one another. They don't believe that tomorrow will be better than today. I tell you my fellow Americans, one of the reasons that I got into this race for President is that I did not want my twelve- year-old daughter or Ann's granddaughter or your children or grandchildren to grow up to be the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents; because I was sick of seeing good, hard-working Americans who live family values work harder every year and spend more time on their job and less time with their kids for lower income. Because I don't believe these problems are insolvable. And if you vote for me, we won't solve all these problem overnight. You know what, things will get better. Tomorrow will be better than today, and the tomorrows after that will be better still. And we'll be going in the right direction, and you'll have a president who believes we're all in this together and everybody counts, and an administration that looks like your America and feels like it. And we can have a song in our heart and a spring in our step, not because all the problems are solved but because America is working again. I'm on your side and I want you on my side. Thank you very much and God bless you all. ------------------------ Woman: We have a few questions from the audience we'd like you to respond to. We know you're in a hurry so we'll kind of just have a few for you. The first question comes from Al Garcia, Washington, D.C. THE FREE TRADE AGREEMENT WITH MEXICO IS A MAJOR INITIATIVE AT THIS TIME. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS A POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENTAL PROGRAM TO MUTUALLY ENHANCE THE BORDER AREAS ECONOMICALLY? Well, I support a new free trade agreement with Mexico, and I have consistently throughout this election. But I don't necessarily support the terms that would be negotiated by this administration. I believe that we need a new trade agreement with Mexico to build on the very hopeful actions taken by the Salinas government over the last few years, in which our trade volume with Mexico has gone up and our trade deficit has gone down. Because all of you know there are a lot of people opposed to this agreement because we have increasing amounts of investment by American companies setting up factories in Mexico and closing them down in the United States. There is a way in which we can all win on this. The new agreement should require significant increases in investment on the other side of the Rio Grande River, in environmental standards and protection, labor standards and wage rates. At the same time the United States should quit blaming other people for its problems and develop a national manufacturing strategy designed to keep more manufacturing jobs here. To those who do not support a free trade agreement, I will remind you: if we don't do anything to develop a manufacturing strategy in our country to keep our best manufacturing jobs here, they will continue to be on a fast track to Mexico and to other countries. What are the problems? Number one, the tax system makes no sense. You get more incentives to shut your plant down and move them overseas than you do to modernize plant and equipment and retrain workers here. We'll reverse that. Number two, we don't control health-care costs. The auto workers are rightly concerned abut losing automobile jobs but the average American car has $600.00 more than the average foreign car in health care cost because this government has stubbornly refused to control health care costs. So my answer is: let's get a new agreement, let's raise standards on both sides of the river. Let's make sure that America has a manufacturing strategy at the same time to keep our best high-wage jobs, then both Mexico and the United States will win. The next question is from Oscar Moran, Texas -- San Antonio, Texas. WHAT ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES? WE ALL APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT YOU'RE PRO-CHOICE. WE NEED SOMEONE WHO WILL GIVE FULL CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTY TO WOMEN IN THIS COUNTRY AND WHO IS HISPANIC. Well, if you read the -- the news reports of the Pennsylvania abortion case, the most important opinion, from my point of view as it relates to this election, was the one written by Justice Blackman, and when he said we are just one judge away from repealing Row v. Wade. Let me say that I intend to appoint judges who believe in the Bill of Rights, the right to privacy and the right to choose. I intend to appoint people who believe in civil rights and equal opportunity for all people. I intend to reverse the intensely political nature of judicial appointments over the last ten years when people were subject to extraordinary litmus tests that were almost completely unrelated often to their judicial qualifications. I have made it a premise of my campaign that I would not promise by category any appointments. And I don't even know if I'll have a Supreme Court appointment, but I can tell you this: I will appoint significant numbers of Hispanics to the cabinet, the White House staff, to the judgeships of this country, and I certainly will give every consideration to Hispanic candidates for the Supreme Court. If you will... Without going into specific numbers, I will say that if you look at my work in Arkansas, and if you ask Mr. Rodriguez he will corroborate this, I think you can see from my record that our administration would look more like America than any administration in the history of the United States. And that is my commitment to you. Thank you, Governor. We at LULAC would like very much to recommend those Hispanics to you. We are ready to help you with your cabinet and Supreme Court Justice appointments. I want to work with LULAC. I eagerly await your recommendations, but I would remind you there's only four months between now and a minor obstacle to my occupying the White House, it's called an election. So while this organization is non-political, as individuals you can afford to be. If I'm going to be on your side, you got to be with me. I need your help and I've really enjoyed being with you today. Thank you very much.